Saturday, September 29, 2007

Wow. OK this book is short, like short-story short and though I loathe to bring up William Burroughs now that I am no longer 19 nor nervously intrigued by extreme possibilities that form the antithesis of my placid life, this little romp of sexless sex and torture and mayhem reminds me of my favorite part in Naked Lunch, where a brother and sister are acting out a stark tableau of brutality on a gallows platform. This also reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, it's weird, inappropriate sit-around-the-cracker-barrel air of some of the dialog while unspeakable acts were happening.

The narrative here quickly goes off the rails and as I darted through its sparse 100 pages, I wasn't sure I had a picture of what was really happening or why, and I think that's what stories like these are doing with their outrageous cruelty - wallowing in the pointlessness and reveling in the immediate cause-effect nature of life and realizing the big picture is easily erased when the blood starts to spill.

I don't know if this is a good book or not, since it was over so fast, but I will say it was a perfect way to blithely kill an hour waiting for your lovely family to get back from Target. Abject cruelty has its amusement factor.

I thought I had read Harry Crews before but a scan through his other title informed me I was mixing him up with Hubert Selby Jr. Maybe I just had the record by Harry Crews, a Sonic Youth side project from 1989, and assumed that I must've read it, since I was reading stuff like this back then. Maybe I just wanted to and finally did it after all these years, which is exactly the motivation for what happens in this book....less Read More...

Friday, September 28, 2007

at Barnes and Noble here in the literary section, or available here for those without well-appointed stands. Purchase a copy and write your very first letter to the editor, saying that article on Daniel Johnston changed your life

Daniel JohnstonHe’s heartsick, and maybe he’s crazy. Even if his eccentricity was just part of the act, the big labels never could quite package him, this self-proclaimed “vampire in a Devil Town.” So what was Daniel Johnston to do? Alex V. Cook takes a closer look at genius behind the madness, at the strange bravery of his love songs.

I have that David Bowie "Andy Warhol" song stuck in my head, so I figured I'd share the wealth.David Bowie – Andy Warhol

Here a trawl through the Warhol offerings on YouTube.

That first video, where he eats a hamburger, is captivating. I had it playing in the background and clicked off on another window to do something and heard the bag rustle and I rushed back to see what was happening! I think that video encapsulates my love of Andy Warhol.

Any of the "he's not a real artist" bullshit falls away from the fact that he has convinced me thirty years later and twenty years dead to not only watch him eat a hamburger for 5 minutes, find a reduction of the human struggle in his trouble with the ketchup bottle, wait as he swallows his food for a Bergman-grade eternity before delivering his sole line, resonating with existential triumph, and then want to tell people about it.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Sam Beam neatly has the folk side of things sewn up, having the dubious distinction of being the only folk singer, besides Dylan, that hipsters can stand. His voice came in on a warm breeze when his demo tape became the unforeseen sensation that The Creek Drank The Cradle became.

The Artists, 2007Scott Barretta writes about the most incarcerated band in America; William Bowers on the befuddling Mayo Thompson; Anthony Mariani on the true progenitors of punk; Holly Gleason on the bedraggled, sharkskin-slick Dwight Yoakam; Aaron Cohen on the creepy, morbidly sweet songs of Percy Mayfield; Amanda Petrusich on the M.I.A. funk diva Betty Davis; Alex Cook on the open-wound genius of Daniel Johnston; Ben Greenman on the redemptive soul of Eldridge Holmes. John Jeremiah Sullivan on the awkward sublimity of the Roches; Plus more—much more. Come on, peek inside...

Here is my mug/blurb for the contributor's page:

Alex V. Cook is the music editor for outsideleft.com and holds the distinction of being the only writer ever to appear in both genteel travel magazine Country Roads and extreme metal rag Hails and Horns in the same month.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

I caught two very distinctive shows this past week involving groups who are masters of their material and instrumentation. First, the Hot 8 Brass Band took to the stage Tuesday at the Manship Theatre. I used to lump brass bands into a nebulous field of "tourist entertainment," but in the past couple years I've really come to appreciate them. ....also, The Dirty ProjectorsRead More...

The morning looked daunting from the outset, but I did manage to go get some bank chores done and solved a critical problem with a thing I'm working on, thereby allaying the anxiety that dragged yesterday through the muck, all within my self-appointed time frame.

I stepped back to take a picture of my work area, quite satisfied with what it had allowed me to accomplish, when the Chicago Underground Trio made the jump from the electro productive "Slon" to the almost inaudible foggy intro to "Zagreb" and just at that juncture of activity to stillness both in the album and myself, it started raining outside, as if the very clouds were feeling my release.

Of course this is pathetic fallacy, but I find it much less pathetic than most of the other fallacies I routinely entertain. Enjoy!

Sunday, September 23, 2007

requires a well-appointed Bloody Mary kit like that my friend John hauled out during tailgating yesterday. My friend Terry said you have to get a nun to stick her middle finger in it to make it complete, but no obvious nuns were available.

The best drink I've ever experienced in the Bloody Mary family came about when my friend George and I rode our bikes down to the recently defunct Thirsty Tiger one impossibly hot Saturday afternoon to get Jeff the World's Greatest Bartender (somehow your tab at the end of the night would be "oh...let's call it six bucks"and he once chased after a certain melodramatic, blind-drunk patron who was intent on jumping in the Mississippi after a really bad night and talked him down) to make a signature drink for George's band Twobanger.

We drank our way through a couple missteps until someone locked in on a tequila Bloody Mary with a shot each of green and red Tabasco, served in a martini glass with three cocktail onions on a plastic sword. It was the drink that ate like a meal, and looked delightfully perverse in the glass as you staggered around in thrift store suit jackets, scanning the room with wolf eyes. I don't think any of the actual band members took to it, but it was my favorite funny car fuel for about a year there.

Akron/Family trajectory followed that of Banhart: they both apprenticed under Michael Gira and had turns in The Angels of Light, and they garnered critical praise for first being weird and then being brilliant. It seems when Banhart branched off from Gira, he started to fly in circles, whereas Akron/Family continues to grow stronger under his care. Love is Simple finds the wide-eyed boys in the family honing their already stunning songcraft. Read more...

I think we have been postmodern long enough that we are post-postmodern. Not has everything already been done, but its all been redone and refitted into the Moebius strip timeline at such an alarming rate, we might have passed ourselves up, flipping us off from the passenger side window. Devendra Banhart and Akron/Family are groups I consider at the forefront of this post-postmodernism, working square pegs of obvious, defiant anachronism into the round holes of Now. Read more...

Friday, September 21, 2007

This was copped from a bloggy friend who answered "no" to the first question.

Do you promote your blog?Yes. Blogging has been very good to me, both psychologically and professionally, so I try to be good to it, if that makes sense. The seeds of my current career were planted in LiveJournal. Plus, I write to an imagined audience, it makes me want to write more and do it better. I had the same impulse when I was a radio DJ; I like the idea of a potential audience, perhaps more than a real one. Besides, my life's dream is to be a cult icon, so someone has to do the legwork on that.

How often do you check hits?I actually don't know how to do this on Blogger, and in my ignorance, I thankfully have one less ego-trap time-suck into which I can fall. And, frankly, the low numbers would kinda bum me out.

Do you stick to one topic?In that I follow my obsessions around, yes. I use this thing as a sketch pad, vault, test lab, archive. I considered working the music angle, since it is the lion's share of my writing, but I'd rather leave it open.

Who knows you have a blog?Anyone that will listen. I am rather proud of this little venture.

How many blogs do you read?Currently, 5, and a couple sweeps through my LJ friends list.

Are you a fast reader?Yes, but I compensate with piles of useless input. Word of advice - stay away from all bulletin boards. As the lights dim and the spectre of death appears on the horizon, the guy that wrote the message board software will be sitting on Satan's smoldering lap, chuckling at the years you've frittered away when you could've be writing that book.

Do you customize your blog or do anything technical?Yes, I am very into social networking gadgets, even though I'm sure my data is being harvested and clones of me are being readied from it.

Do you blog anonymously?No. I made an early choice in the Internet life to post as myself, and have found it to be quietly rewarding.

To what extent do you censor yourself?Mostly I try to avoid being boring, otherwise, I don't think I have that much of controversy to say. And I generally don't care about getting in trouble. Not that I am a badass or have unfaltering integrity, it's just that my dog runs faster off the leash.

The best thing about blogging?Obsessing and meta-obsessing and whatever this is. Also, ego, ego, ego. I'm am half-pretending that I am being interviewed by the New York Times as I type this. No, Mr. Garner, I happen to think that I am using the web as an exoskeleton of my own divining, kinda like Dr. Octopus, to extend my reach and increase the tenacity of my grasp - so none of my time online is a waste. Much in the way Kanye West augments himself with Daft Punk's vocoder, I become harder, better, faster, stronger.

I headed to the wilds of North Baton Rouge to find some ramshackle BBQ place which was not where I thought it should be, so I opted for Bellue's. They are regionally famous for their sausage, boudin and bacon, but I've never had a plate lunch from there. Afterwards, I realized that I perhaps have never had a proper plate lunch before, if this what defines it.

For $6: four juicy baby back ribs, cornbread dressing, white beans with tasso, potato salad, and white bread for the sopping. I started to feel slight remorse that I didn't get a sausage plate from the Best Sausage Maker in Town, but lo, peeking at me from under the horror of bones and napkins was a perfect link of their Italian sausage, which was plump and firm like a hot dog (like Heaven), but smoky and nuanced inside (like Hell.)

I glanced up from this hallucination of meat to see the owner force a small plate of sweet potatoes on some guy waiting for his order, but before I could wave my sauce-covered hand and shout ME ME OVER HERE ME... he jumped on a motherfucking Segway and waved as he eased out the door. Mind you, this is in an "industrial wasteland" part of town, not some techno-hippie strip with a spa at one end and a gelato place at the other. He runs a welding yard right next door. I ran out after him to try and get a picture and establish that this was not some form of meat-fever overtaking me, but he had silently, futuristically eco-glided off into the welding yard before I could get my camera ready.

The process of 16 year-old second-generation cassette recorded on the sketchiest of equipment -> Cubase (via 4-track) -> low grade mp3 to shrink the file size -> myspace didn't help the fidelity much, but it was still fun to hear after all these years.

I remember at the time I was seriously working a Nurse With Wound and Brian Eno habit and decided that surely I too could make spooky ambient process music. This was the first music I did that I considered serious enough to put out under my name.

Each piece runs about 14 minutes, as to get the most mileage off a C-60.

Here's the track-by-track breakdown:

1) The Critter Within - Terrible title. This was likely done for my friend/pen pall/cassette-colleague Minoy, since he favored a lot of shrieks and what not over a thick bed of ambient noise. The vocals and turntable bits were recorded in the KLSU productions room using the reel-to-reel tape for delay, and then was (somewhat inadvisably, in hindsight) augmented with keyboards later at home. The spooky monster/Exorcist vocals - not sure what I was channeling then. I was in my first year working for the state as a COBOL programmer, so I imagine that factored into it.

2) Funeral March of the Dull Cow - I still like this piece. It was an attempt to see how reductive I could get with my source material, in this case a stewpot lid tapped with a rubber ball mallet. Then, as it played back, I sampled it on the SK-1 and added accompaniment, and then again on another pass. This was all before I had a four track; overdubs involved a couple generic Walkmen fed into a $20 Radio Shack microphone mixer to the input jacks on my stereo.

3) Compounded Recursion of Bad Days - This was frustration in action. The TV, featuring a young talk-show era Geraldo Rivera and a stopwatch form the basis and then 30-second answering machine tapes were used to record and playback voice, flute and keyboards, getting deeper and deeper until it reaches cacophony, though arguably, it didn't really have that far to go.

4) Something from the Swamp - This was a a keyboard and percussion (stewpot lid again) thing recorded to fill up the tape, but I think there are some decent moments in there. Brian Eno's At Land was a crucial album in my listening back then, and this was definitely inspired by it.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

I drove home on River Road listening to The Black Keys' Rubber Factory, unearthed from the garbage dump under the seat in my car.

As I was making this long lopey curve, driving a little too fast, feeling those slight G-forces, the stoney guitar gallop in "Act Nice and Gentle" kicked in, as if it was being coughed up from by car after a juicy bong hit.

I glanced up and saw a buzzard gliding in in a lazy arc opposite to the curve of the road, as if it were completing the circle. Corny, perfect rock 'n roll moment.

The October Issue is out (in the UK anyway, sometimes it takes as long as a month to get to the US) and features yours truly in the Global Ear section, discussing the underground music scene in New Orleans.

I used to think that people who came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s held on to their music a little to desperately as they got older. Any hint of that golden era would set off a flood of nostalgia that I thought embarrassing, until that analogous deluge of fondness for music from my high school years rose up after catching John Vanderslice at the Spanish Moon on Saturday night. Read More...

Francesca Gavin gave an exhibition of sound sculpture at the Tate Modern a ho-hum run through in The Guardian, dully complaining that there was little melody. It is not called "song sculpture" for a very specific reason; these artists are dealing with sound as a medium, not songs. Complaining that they don't sound like songs is like saying a porcelain figurine of a cat looks nothing whatsoever like a toilet, despite the fact that they are both made of porcelain.

She did however top it with that awesome picture of Italian futurist artist Luigi Russolo'sIntonarumori, a machine constructed in 1913 to flesh out some of his theories later published in his manifesto The Art of Noise. None of these contraptions survived the way, but recordings of them did, offered up generously by the fine people at ubu.com

As far as I know, no footage of Russolo's noise concerts exists, but here is a group of art students reenacting a noise concert on the YouTube (in 8 parts)

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

My friend and brilliant visual/sound artist Philip recently unearthed some cassettes of music that I made back in the early 90s, and sent them to me so I can have digital copies and possibly drop them onto myspace. I'm not exactly sure how many "albums" I recorded because at one point, a guy here in town that was running a small but enterprising experimental music cassette label expressed enthusiastic interest in releasing them, so I lent him all the master copies and subsequently he disappeared and in his infrequent re-emergences, he professes ignorance of their wearabouts.

Back then in the cassette culture underground, where we traded our homespun tapes on our homespun labels and built a pre-Internet network through fanzines like Factsheet Five and tons of trips to the post office, you had to have a name for your project, and frequently had different names for different facets of ones obscure output. I was riding somewhere with my girlfriend back then, and we saw a sign on a building for "Pain Clinic" and boom, I had an instant band name. Regicide Bureau was the name used by Tom Sutter, a rather sizable player in cassette culture back then. We had traded things for a while and then he informed me that his fiancee was speaking at a conference in New Orleans, and could they stay at my place, with hopes of collaborating. Music was a completely solitary activity then, so those two tapes contain the first time I ever played music with another person. I remember her angrily sleeping off the flu in my bed in the other room while Tom and I made racket in the other. (Randy - these were recorded in the apartment in which you currently reside)

I still think Pain Clinic is a great band name, but, while I don't actually remember the nature of the pieces on Stills, but I do remember considering them "more serious work" and worthy of not having to hide behind a pseudonym.

Just to show that the ironic gods have comedic timing, there was a second tape bearing my name after that called Shifts that was comprised of pieces based on Alvin Lucier's compositions. I used to have a copy of it in the glovebox of my old car, and remember taking it out when I traded it in, thinking "wow, thank goodness this didn't get lost" and then immediately tucked it away somewhere so it would be lost forever.

I am in deep submersion in Alvin Lucier's still, quivering world of sonic exploration of minute sonic phenomena. It's like spelunking in a way, and the endless exploration of seemingly monotonous territory bears a resemblance to that of the house in House of Leaves, corridor after corridor of the same but there is a compulsion to go on. Except Lucier is arguably less terrifying than the physical manifestation of an internal metaphysical hell as exhibited in the book.

I've concocted a book idea out of this exploration and even enlisted a friend to help with the scholarly angle, or rather, he enlisted himself and I gratefully took him on and last night got 2,000 words into the first draft. I love this obsessive phase of things. I feel a connection to the artist's work and its connection to my work and most importantly, the shock of the current running through that connection. At 2 a.m. I was gleefully plugging footnotes into a document. On my to-do list today is go to the library and look up a Kierkegaard quote. I am using italics in excess. I feel positively writerly today.

Above is a video I stumbled on to of someone performing Lucier's Music for Solo Performer, where the performer's brainwaves are recorded and amplified to make vibrations on percussion instruments, essential creating music with his or her thoughts. This melodramatic performance film is a little more Nosferatu than how I see most of Lucier's work, but its gives a glimpse into his unique character as a composer and how this curious work is interpreted.

My room is redder than red with cheap strings of lights filling the room with thinned blood, a heavy ether that is only strengthened in contrast by the blinding white emptiness of Microsoft Word staring up from my lap, and when I gaze away from it, I pick out flyers and cheap guitars and a shelf full of things all vying for contrast in that red haze. And when I finally go to bed in the next room, I can see the blue of the coffee pot light like the pupil of a red eye and then everything goes black.

Monday, September 17, 2007

I know this has been posted everywhere, but man, 17? You have to wonder is that gets him laid by girls who have looked up at a poster of his infant penis in their older siblings' teenage bedrooms, or maybe that poster had long come down. It's like being a postmodern Oscar Meyer weiner kid.

And for a band that had as consistent a catalog, one that still holds up rather well, Nirvana had the misfortune to come up in the anti-image era, where all the album covers were terrible, and Nirvana was no exception.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Yesterday at the grocery store she was asking me a million successive questions

What is magma made of?Is magma the hottest thing on the earth?What can break up a rock?OK, then what can break up a diamond?It's made of clear coal?What's inside a mirror?

and so on and so forth and only added to the frazzled hustle of the grocery store. We got over to the produce aisle and she asked "How do baby birds know when to leave the nest?" and I thought, what a poetic question to throw in amongst all these scientific inquiries, building her own escape route form the nest. I also thought, dude, we are in the middle of the grocery store so can we table this discussion for later? I quipped "Well, I think its has to do with instinct, like they just know" and she all but rolled her eyes and said, "No, it's a joke, Daddy. How do baby birds know when to leave the nest?....They just wing it. Get it? Wing it?"

Friday, September 14, 2007

Alex V. Cook's reviewrating: recommended for: smart people with a sense of humor

This book was a pleasure to read. I had a Harry Potter I-am-now-a-Reader reaction to reading it, like I wanted to read it all the time. The book is imbued with obsession from its storyline to its idiosyncratic layout, with words appearing at weird angles, "house" always appearing in blue, multiple story lines going on on the same page, printed in different fonts etc etc... and that obsession was passed on to me as I read it.

Story wise, and structure-wise, I have to say it is rather Hollywood manipulative, in the best way. The shifts in narratives creating a Hitchcock tension, waiting for something to happen, while the horrors within the house are depicted with vivid alacrity. At first I found Johnny Truant's narrative as obvious as his name, but they grew on me, and the interplay between him, the narrator he's describing, the people that narrator is describing and the house that they are describing is intoxicating. Its like that TV in Poltergeist; you know you want to stick your hand in there.

My one complaint was the closure that the author forced us into at the ending, but I am willing to accept that this closure was highly ironic, considering the book is physically about a house with no closure, and stylistically is about the endless goose-chase that writing can be. In calculus terms, this book is the limit as x approaches "meta" without reaching implosion.

The mock-academic action, all those footnotes and cross-referencing, was one of my favorite parts, presenting the idea that all these conferences and books and symposia were all dedicated to this cast of semi-interesting characters and that the physical abberation that was the house is reduced to fodder for hackneyed self-referential analysis on the part of all these experts. I suspect Danielewski has done some time in a Comparative Lit grad program and has the scars to prove it.

House of Leaves is a complex yet imminently readable, intellectual, fun thriller, and a triumph of cleverness in dull, dry times where people peck like birds at the facts, seeming to have lost their taste for a good story.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

From the ever-shirtless Glenn Danzig, charming the pants off the literary crowd with "stuff your mainstream churches don't want you to know about". I wish this was a weekly segment of The Dan reviewing books on CBS Sunday Morning, glorious in flickering candle-light.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

My weekend of sonic exploration took on a decidedly blue tint when I stepped into The Exchange, a used-record store tucked away in a spot right next to the old Broadmoor theater. My leisure time used to be taken up with used record stores, gleefully killing the afternoon shuffling through the stacks, mentally assessing what I had at home I could trade, looking to see what just came in. LSU's North Gate area used to be dotted with them. I thought these spots were a dying breed until this weekend. Read More...

(This pic is not from The Exchange, but from Amoeba Records in Hollywood, which is a mind- boggling place with miles of used CD's)

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

The way the first track “Peacebone” seems to start midstream in the midst of some delay pedal mishap of loops and jittery crittering is exactly how a listener new to the Collective must feel popping this disk. These digital hippies have been riding the crest of hipster credibility since sleepy eyed boys in asymmetric haircuts were intoning “I was into them on Here Comes the Indian” when they hit their creative nadir in 2004 with Sung Tongs. Their 2005 album Feels pushed the Brian Wilson shoo-be-doo side of the Collective and for me, lost the way, but this new release brings the Animalistic peace train back on its hover track. And just as quickly, derails it. Read more...

David Loti of the local indie pop group A Soup Named Stew has proven himself a solo jack of all trades, singing his clever, funny, heartfelt pop, playing drums and the keyboards—simultaneously. We caught up with Loti to see what makes the erudite octopus tick. Read More...

Saturday, September 8, 2007

For a flat of CD's that I will never listen to again, and possibly didn't even listen to the first time around, I walked away with these:

Robert Jr. Lockwood is Robert Johnson's stepson and a renowned guitarist in his own right, and David "Honeyboy" Edwards played with Johnson and is still alive to tell about it. I listened to Honeyboy on the way home from the CD store, since it was the artist I knew the least about, but the plunky acoustic guitar and old-man-from-the-mountains blues voice indicated the high quality of my bounty.

Junior Kimbrough was a Mississippi juke joint proprietor and influential guitarist that rose to fame with Robert Palmer's "Deep Blues" documentary. Palmer produced All Night Long, Kimbrough's first album. He has a menacing drone to his guitar work and a whisp moaning vocal that issues out lyrics of frank and often shocking narratives, like the bit in "You Better Run" where a girl runs into his bar to get away from a boy after her.

I personally think Junior Kimbrough is the bomb, and my favorite blues artist right after John Lee Hooker.

This R.L. Burnside is the sketchiest of the batch, but I didn't have it and now I do. It's a somewhat ill-advised collaboration, remixes of his searing blues by Alec Empire and Beck's DJ Tom Rothrock, in an attempt to cash in on the fame garnered by Alabama3(who's "Woke up This Morning" became the theme to The Sopranos years later).

This 1971 live-in -the-studio romp from John Lee Hooker, right at the height of his second bout of fame, is supposed to be brilliant though and will likely make up for any downfall R.L might exhibit. Added bonus is that the version I got is a cheap reissue on SpotLite records with the original cover surrounded by rainbow stripes and the jewel case is dirty and sooty because it was salvaged from a house fire.From the Exchange: Broadmoor Shopping center by the old movie theatre, 9812 Florida Blvd, Baton Rouge, LA 70815 (map)

My friend John burning the fuck out of his hand, lighting the butane burner on which he makes sausage and eggs for all the cops in the morning -

Which is how he gets away with having a tow-behind bbq pit, exceeding the parade ground size limit, under the same prime spot under a giant oak every home game. That's the ESPN stage/tent monstrosity in the fuzzy background. It's is a perfect spot to bring -

Maya and her friends who run around in a fit of donut frenzy, and then disappear into

Friday, September 7, 2007

Jasper Johns, Racing Thoughts, 1983, Encaustic and collage on canvasWhitney Museum of American Art, New York, linked from here

My mind is compulsive but my will is weak and this portal, this ego trap that bears my name and is so easy to massage and mold and tweak gives my mind a short circuit over my will. It does not require convincing my will to allow my body to embrace risk or my spine to be brave, or my cognition to have a plan; it just needs to make the jump to my hands and, if the rest of me has managed to pay the cable bill, my mind is freed from the leash of my will to run.

I generally abhor exercise. It always feels like preparing for an event that will never come, a wood-chipping of time that could have been used in something more fun. When I read Jasper Johns' comment that he decided to stop becoming an artist and decide to be an artist, it had a huge impact on me, and since then, I usually go into things as the Thing, not an Aspirer to Thinghood. This works great for the mind, but the body is a tough sell.

I've come to appreciate the grind of the track, its set cycles of 6 1/2 laps on the outer rim equal a mile, and while my daughter is at gymnastics, I have a perfect bracket in which I would otherwise not be doing anything else anyway. I am still a walker but one day I expect to hear a click in my head that says start running. Instead of aspiring to be a runner though, I am a dedicated occasional walker. Philosophy makes the best cop-outs.

What I do hear is the indulgences of the iPod, an hour of concentrated listening uninterrupted by "I should be doing something productive" since, well, I am. I like endurance test listening, extreme pieces, harshly minimal music, things to which one must submit, on the track. They blank out the errant dumb conversations of the others gathered there, like me, waiting out their kids in gymnastics classes in the adjoining gym. So, on my Alvin Lucier kick, I decided to sweat it out with his 1977 piece Music On a Long Thin Wire (wiki entry), described by the composer as such:

Music on a Long Thin Wire of a is constructed as follows: the wire is extended across a large room, clamped to tables at both ends. The ends of the wire are connected to the loudspeaker terminalspower amplifier placed under one of the tables. A sine wave oscillator is connected to the amplifier. A magnet straddles the wire at one end. Wooden bridges are inserted under the wire at both ends to which contact microphones are imbedded, routed to the stereo sound system. The microphones pick up the vibrations that the wire imparts to the bridges and are sent through the playback system. By varying the frequency and loudness of the oscillator, a rich variety of slides, frequency shifts, audible beats and other sonic phenomena may be produced.

On the recording I have, it consists of 4 variants, using different frequencies on the oscillator to create slightly different wavering sine waves, things humming along and then creating a sudden groan of the waves going out of phase with themselves. To get the real effect, I would expect that one should listen to this performed live in an otherwise silent room, as one's body would become a factor in the piece itself, but who has the time to set up all that equipment. I got shit to do Alvin, I can pencil in an hour.

The drones had to compete with the 60-cycle hum of the lights overhead, which became deafening once the inane chatter of humanity was excised from my consciousness, and made for a nice counterpoint to these 18-minute drones that rose and fell like a lukewarm tide in a dead lake. In the YouTube comments of the raga piece I posted the other day, somebody snarked about the tamboura player, the guy playing the bass-like thing in the middle, idly plucking what seemed like the same note as his two cohorts were displaying amazing instrumental prowess on the sitar and tabla. A more knowledgable poster responded by saying (sic)

Hello mates.

The guy in the middle may sound funny or useless, but he's a fundamental element in the performance. He's playing the tampura, producing a bee-like continueous vibration. If he stops playing, the sitarist looses reference notes for his raga, and the "meditative" effect of the performance immediately shatters.

The cheap noisy lighting LSU uses for its indoor track served as the tamboura to Alvin's relative soloing on Long Thin Wire, bouncing around the narrow frequency band to which its setup allowed. I'm relistening to it now in a coffee shop as I type this, but the mix of blenders, yammering sales pitch some realtor is laying out, the exasperated sighs of the guy at the next table, anguished over the uncracked class binder laying in wait behind the screen of his laptop, not to mention the lite jazz wafting in every now and then, overwhelm the piece. The meditative effect is indeed shattered.

But with that hum, and the preoccupation of the body, you feel like you are looking at deeper and deeper at things, either constantly focusing in or zooming out, the continuity of existence preventing you from realizing which way you are going. Maybe meditation works on a superficial way because its easy; a hum, a repetition is all it takes to push you into temporary timelessness. You won't reach Nirvana on the track or with humming wires, but you can leave the pavement.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Hip-hop is the Zarathustra of pop music, the last man standing, pulling in everything that came before it, the highs of production technology and texturing down to the basest thug posturing, simultaneously working the vein of and railing against racial stereotypes, acting like its going to ditch us all for our weakness before it Shaolin struts into the fog. Read More...

I suggested this book as the first for a new book club and immediately regretted the decision, since I had a really hard time finishing it. But, The Rings of Saturn is brilliant, opening vortices of memory and history, fact and fiction collapsing and exploding as he plods along the melancholy East Anglia coast. As a narrator, he is completely charming and his tangents soar from the gray coast on gossamer wings...Read More...

Matos comes on very strong, talking about how Prince figures into his life as a welfare kid in the suburbs, and that Prince came via his mama's and aunt's record collections, but when he gets to the record itself, it's a confusing game of track comparison. Read More...